For the last few days, I've spent some time working on my stuff for therapy. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'm happy I'm doing the work in a reasonable manner, spacing it out over a period of days so that I will get all of it caught up. On the other hand, doing work of this nature is the emotional equivalent of beating yourself with a hammer and waiting for the bruises to show.
Today's work was particularly frustrating because most of it was about childhood family dynamics. Because I spent some years living with my mother and some living with my grandparents, I sort of see myself as having two sets of childhood dynamics. It gets confusing and I think a lot of it is why I can flow so fluidly from one type of person to the other, and feel comfortable being both.
The Childhood of Lilly, living with Vicki.
Okay, I put "raised" but then changed it to "living with," because I can't really consider what Mom did as "raising." Raising implies some kind of slightly active teaching and/or nurturing of a younger person. That just simply was never the case.
My mother is 19 years older than me. I was born in wedlock, but she was pregnant when she got married. She did drugs when she was pregnant with me, smoked, and drank. I'm not sure but I get the impression that being pregnant was never something she was thrilled about, just something she was going through.
My mother didn't like me. She resented me, felt I was a burden to her, and never gave my thoughts, feelings, or safety any regard in her activities. To be fair, she did feed me. I was given a room in her home. On her good days, she was charming enough to make me feel special. I kind of hate that last part. My mother could be so enchanting. I think my life could have been a lot easier and less frustrating if I just could have not loved her. I did love her though. It just never mattered.
Life with her was chaotic and unpredictable. She was an alcoholic, sometimes a drug addict. She managed to marry badly and find even worse husbands past that. Her husbands were always abusive dicks. She always took their side. Any protesting I or my brother made against said husbands was met with resentment.
The house was rarely clean. I can remember being young and shoved into a chair to stand on to do dishes. Said dishes would have piled up over several weeks and only be washed because there literally was nothing else to use. So I would stand there in the chair, for hours, washing and washing, then walking around on the counters to put the dishes away. Oh and then I would get yelled at because they weren't clean enough. If only I would have had the articulation to point out that this is probably the best you can get from having someone under ten wash your filthy dishes.
We were poor and sometimes bills didn't get paid. However, though we might go for a while without power, we did have beer and smokes. Oh yes, always that. So I was one of those poor kids, the ones who received the pitying looks from teachers and snobbery from other children. We lived in a small area and everybody knew what kind of crazy my mom was. And even though this shouldn't be reflected onto the kids, it always is.
One time I was listening to someone discuss how quite often older children are resentful of late in life babies, because they take resources from the family. The person speaking said that it was perfectly justifiable for the older siblings to ignore this younger one and they should never be forced to take it places of help with it. At the time, these statements bothered me on a very deep and personal level. I didn't understand why at first, but finally realized that I was getting so emotional about it because this was exactly how my mother treated me.
Really, that is what it was like. She treated me like I was some little sister her parents were forcing her to hang out with. A little sister, one that she was, in no way, responsible for, but saddled with, because her parents were too old to handle the new baby. She acted like I was robbing her of her resources, taking up her time and energy, and that I had no right to do any of this.
So most of my childhood with my mom was spent in my room, reading books to escape and entertain myself so that I wouldn't be noticed or resented any more than necessary. The things we did bond over were usually music or movies, and then no more than two sisters would. She routinely told me I was selfish, bitchy, calling attention to myself, unattractive, and strange.
And even though she added that compliment of "strange," I still always caught on to how much she wished I wasn't there.
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